Fireblocks Expands Support for Banking & Financial Institutions with New HSM, Public & Private Cloud Capabilities

  • Blockchain
  • 27.06.2023 08:35 am

Today, Fireblocks, an enterprise platform to manage digital asset operations and build innovative businesses on the blockchain, expands its highly secure MPC-CMP wallet and key management technology to include support for HSMs and public and private cloud, including Thales, Securosys, AWS, GCP, and Alibaba Cloud. These flexible deployment models allow banks and financial institutions to leverage Fireblocks' industry-leading security and technology stack to quickly bring their digital asset initiatives into production while meeting their risk, compliance, and regulatory requirements.

Fireblocks is trusted by some of the most recognized banks and financial institutions in the world to bring their digital asset strategies to production, including BNY Mellon, BNP Paribas, ANZ Bank, NAB, ABN AMRO, BTG Pactual, Tel Aviv Stock Exchange, and SIX Digital Exchange. These institutions have leveraged Fireblocks to build new digital asset custody, trading, clearing and settlement services, tokenization of financial products such as tokenized fiat, central bank digital currencies (CBDC), carbon credits, and more. 

“With Fireblocks, we were able to take our digital treasury bond initiative — Project Eden — from ideation to go-live in five months,” said Orly Grinfeld, EVP, Head of Clearing at Tel Aviv Stock Exchange. “We were impressed with their ability to work with us and meet our extensive compliance and security requirements. Their world-class security operations and modular infrastructure allowed us to deploy wallets to our primary dealers, which included international banks like Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, and JP Morgan. Not only were we able to ensure that the entire workflow operations were secure, but that all the vendors were streamlined and deployed in order to bring Eden live quickly.”

To ensure that financial institutions — including banks, ​​asset managers, financial market infrastructure, and central banks — can easily deploy the Fireblocks platform in their existing IT infrastructure with their security policies, Fireblocks’ expanded range of support will include:

  • HSMs PKCS#11 support including Thales, Securosys, and other compatible HSMs
  • Customer hosting all MPC key shares and sealing with HSM security
  • New cloud-based secure enclaves AWS Nitro and GCP and Alibaba Cloud SGX, in addition to Fireblocks’ existing Azure SGX support
  • New shared regional data centers across the EU, Switzerland, and Hong Kong along with Fireblocks’ current shared data centers in the US
  • Dedicated single-tenant cloud environment

“As the financial ecosystem evolves, we are focused on enhancing our core capabilities by exploring digital technologies and processes, including blockchain,” said Sarthak Pattanaik, CIO, Digital Assets, Treasury Services, Clearance and Collateral Management at BNY Mellon. “We look forward to our continued collaboration with Fireblocks and leveraging their best-in-class services that support our ongoing efforts to address the needs of our institutional clients.”

“From the very beginning, the Fireblocks platform was created and designed to be business-first. We understand the risk requirements in the bank at an architectural level and we have strategically developed components to make sure that our customers can get from proof-of-concept to production in the shortest timeframe possible,” said Michael Shaulov, Co-founder and CEO of Fireblocks. “In the last three years, Fireblocks has been working with some of the most well-known banks and financial institutions at the cutting edge of the digital asset and crypto industry. To date, we’ve successfully brought 50 banks into the digital asset space, so we’re excited to be able to further our commitment to this segment by providing the right infrastructure support for any bank or financial institution to bring their digital asset offering to market.”

Banks and financial institutions find success in bringing their digital asset products to production by leveraging key components of the Fireblocks platform. Foundational to the ecosystem is the Fireblocks Network, which connects the largest consortium of regulated financial institutions that have implemented digital assets on the blockchain. The connectivity to the Fireblocks Network allows companies to execute their business strategies almost immediately by putting them in touch with exchanges, market makers, and other distribution partners such as private banks or fintech platforms. Fireblocks APIs also enable direct integration with the world’s leading core banking systems, including Temenos, Avaloq, and FIS, further expanding the ecosystem’s reach. 

In addition, the platform’s tokenization capabilities support the end-to-end lifecycle management for tokenized assets, including smart contract management, minting and burning, distribution, and custody across public, private, and permissioned blockchains. This provides banks with full control over their digital assets as they engage with their counterparties. Lastly, Fireblocks’ powerful Policy Engine governs workflows within the Fireblocks console, giving owners full control to secure actions against internal collusion, human error, and external attacks. Customers may also integrate Fireblocks compliance partners directly into the Policy Engine to automate transaction screening workflows to meet evolving digital asset regulatory requirements and address the latest industry threats.

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